World Wide Web Consortium Lists: 400,000 emails

HTML 4.0, XML, PNG, CSS, DOM, and XQuery: These are but a few of the technologies to come out of the World Wide Web Consortium, commonly referred to as the W3C. We're proud to announce that MarkMail (which by the way uses all of those technologies!) has loaded the full W3C public mailing lists. They start in 1994 and cover 400,000 emails across 200 mailing lists.


With such a long and deep history it's fun to do a little archaeology: You can find the first mention of XML back in 1996. I tried to find the formal "XML 1.0" announcement and saw there wasn't one, but on launch day (February 10, 1998) you can find people complaining about rendering issues with the spec. Isn't that always the way with mailing lists? By the way, it's fun to use XML to search on the birth of XML.

Google first came up as a topic in August 1998, back when its domain ended "stanford.edu". That beats any other list by 5 months. The first mention of XQuery didn't come until January 2001, well after xml-dev and other lists were talking about it. I expect there's more chatter in the private W3C archives.

Finally, the first mention of MarkMail came in December 2007. And what a great post it was! :)